Geoffrey Burling wrote:
I agree with you, I honestly do, but consider the challenge I face in my little corner of Wikipedia: it is the exception, not the rule, that a given placename has several spellings & at least one alternative name. Having only one name spelled one way per town, mountain, river -- & even person -- would make my research much easier, let alone naming articles. [...] If you can come up with a better way to provide this information than using those ugly parantheses, I'm all ears. But until then, I'll stick with them. At least it's consistent, so if someone does come up with a better way, it'll be much simpler to fix.
One method I like is to move it to its own section once it gets past some subjective "too unwieldy" limit. For example, look at how [[Muammar al-Gaddafi]] handles the zillions of transliteration variations: In a separate "name" section (section 9 currently), not in the intro or anywhere near it.
-Mark